Brooklyn Bridge: The Untold Story Behind The Iconic Landmark

Most people cross the Brooklyn Bridge in about 30 minutes. They stop for photos at the towers, point at Lady Liberty somewhere in the haze to the south, and descend into DUMBO with sore legs and a full camera roll. They leave thinking they have seen the bridge.

They have seen the top of it.

Beneath the wooden pedestrian walkway, inside the 60,000-ton granite anchorage blocks on both shores, and behind the locked doors that city maintenance workers pass without a second glance, the Brooklyn Bridge holds a layer of history so rich and so strange that it reads more like fiction than infrastructure. Wine cellars stocked with Bordeaux and Champagne. A nuclear bunker sealed for fifty years. Eight rooms designed for shopping arcades that became storage for things nobody remembers. And the ghost of a woman who spent a decade doing a job she was never allowed to officially hold.

This is the version of the Brooklyn Bridge that most guides skip.

Quick Facts Worth Knowing

Three Engineers, One Bridge: The Roebling Family

The idea of bridging the East River is almost as old as the city itself. Ferry crossings between Manhattan and Brooklyn were plagued by ice, fog, and delay for decades. By the 1850s, the two boroughs together made up one of the largest population centers in the United States, yet the only way across was a boat. Engineers floated proposals for a bridge, but the river is wide, its currents fierce, and the span required would be longer than anything ever attempted.

John Augustus Roebling was the man who said he could do it. Born in Prussia in 1806 and trained as a civil engineer, he had already built the world's first successful wire suspension bridges by the time he arrived in New York. His Niagara Falls Railway Suspension Bridge, completed in 1855, was considered a marvel. His 1,057-foot span over the Ohio River at Cincinnati proved that wire cable could carry a full railroad. He was, in short, the only person alive who could credibly propose a 1,600-foot bridge over the East River.

He got the commission in 1867. Two years later, while making final measurements at the Brooklyn ferry slip, a ferry crushed his foot against a piling. He refused amputation. Tetanus set in within three weeks, and he was dead before construction had properly begun.

His son, Washington Roebling, was 32 years old when the project fell to him. Washington was not a man who had been handed an easy career. He had served as a Union Army officer at Gettysburg, where he helped haul artillery up Little Round Top under Confederate fire. He understood pressure. He also understood bridges better than almost anyone alive, having worked alongside his father from the beginning. He took over as chief engineer in 1869 and began construction in earnest on January 2, 1870.

Building Under the River: Caissons, Fire and the Bends

The foundation problem was the hardest part. To anchor two towers in the floor of the East River, workers had to dig through riverbed sediment down to bedrock. The engineering solution was the pneumatic caisson: an enormous inverted wooden box, sealed at the top and open at the bottom, lowered to the riverbed and filled with compressed air to keep the water out. Workers descended through airlocks, dug and blasted in the lit cavern below, and sent the material up through tubes to be dumped in the river.

The conditions inside the caissons were brutal. Temperatures climbed above 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the compressed air. The light was dim and strange. Voices sounded different. And when fires broke out, as they did several times because the pressurized air fed flames with extraordinary speed, they were nearly impossible to control. One fire in 1871 burned inside the Brooklyn caisson for days before it was finally smothered with water and cement. Washington Roebling himself went into the caisson to assess the damage and direct the response.

The invisible danger was what the workers called caisson disease, though nobody at the time understood what caused it. When workers rose too quickly from the compressed air environment to surface pressure, dissolved nitrogen came out of solution in their bloodstreams, forming bubbles that could lodge in joints, the spine, or the brain. Men who came up from a shift sometimes collapsed on the ground. Some could not walk. Some went blind or deaf. Some never recovered. Over the course of the bridge's construction, more than 100 workers were killed or permanently disabled by what we now call decompression sickness, or the bends.

Washington Roebling himself was struck down in the spring of 1872. He had been spending 12-hour shifts in the caissons and came up too quickly after one particularly long day. He was pulled to the surface barely conscious. What followed was years of partial paralysis, sensitivity to light and noise so extreme that he could barely leave a darkened room, and near-complete loss of his voice for extended periods. He was 34 years old and could not set foot on the bridge he was supposed to be building.

The Woman Who Actually Ran the Project

Emily Warren Roebling had met her future husband at a Civil War encampment when she was visiting her brother, General Gouverneur K. Warren. She was educated at a prestigious Georgetown convent school, intellectually restless, and, as Washington himself noted in one of his letters, possessed of more common sense than any two engineers he had ever encountered. She had traveled to Europe with Washington in 1867 specifically to research caisson technology for the bridge project. She gave birth to their only child, John A. Roebling II, in Germany during that trip.

When Washington was incapacitated, Emily did not simply relay messages. She taught herself advanced mathematics, cable construction theory, and the specific engineering demands of a suspension bridge at this scale. She studied the technical literature. She showed up at the construction site every day. She managed contractors, navigated political disputes, and dealt with the engineers who reported daily progress. For over a decade, the Brooklyn Bridge had a chief engineer who watched from his bedroom window through a telescope while his wife did the work.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was formally completed on May 24, 1883, Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross it by carriage, carrying a live rooster in her lap as a symbol of victory. Congressman Abram Hewitt praised her in his opening ceremony speech, calling the bridge an everlasting monument to the sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for education from which she had been too long disbarred.

Emily never held an official engineering title. She went on after the bridge to earn a law degree from New York University, one of the first women to do so. She died in 1903 of stomach cancer. Today a plaque on the bridge bears her name alongside Washington's and John's. In 2018, a block of Columbia Heights in Brooklyn was officially renamed Emily Warren Roebling Way, the street where she lived while running the most ambitious construction project of the 19th century from a townhouse command center.

Opening Day: A Triumph That Turned Deadly

The official opening ceremony on May 24, 1883 was the social event of the decade. President Chester A. Arthur crossed the bridge in procession to be greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low. Cannons fired from ships in the East River. A band played. Fireworks lit the harbor. Washington Roebling watched from his bedroom window, too ill to attend. He received President Arthur for a brief handshake at the house afterward.

On the first full day the bridge was open to the public, 150,300 pedestrians and 1,800 vehicles crossed. The numbers speak to how desperately the city had needed this connection. For 13 years the two halves of what would become New York had been separated by water. Now they were linked by the longest suspension bridge ever built.

Six days later, the celebration curdled into tragedy. On May 30, 1883, Memorial Day, an estimated 20,000 people crowded the bridge approach. A woman tripped on the stairs at the Manhattan end. The woman behind her screamed. The crowd, already anxious about whether a structure this large could possibly be safe, interpreted the scream as a signal that the bridge was collapsing. In the surge that followed, twelve people were crushed to death and dozens more were seriously injured. Personal effects left behind when the police finally cleared the bridge included 42 umbrellas and parasols, 6 canes, 34 bonnets, a skirt, and 6 pairs of shoes.

The bridge was not structurally at fault. A subsequent inquiry found no engineering failure. But the public's confidence had been shaken at the worst possible moment, in the opening week of a structure that had cost 13 years and millions of dollars to build. Something had to be done to restore trust in the bridge before the entire project became associated with catastrophe.

Why 21 Elephants Had to Cross the Bridge

P.T. Barnum had actually offered to parade his elephants across the bridge at the time of opening, in 1883. The offer was declined. The city had a perfectly fine bridge and did not, apparently, need a circus to prove it.

After the stampede that killed twelve people, the thinking changed. The bridge management company decided that what the public needed was a theatrical demonstration of structural strength so impossible to dismiss that no one could maintain their doubt. Barnum renewed his offer. This time the city accepted, no toll required.

On the evening of May 17, 1884, Barnum led a procession of 21 elephants and 17 camels across the bridge from the Brooklyn side to Manhattan, with his famous 6-ton African elephant Jumbo bringing up the rear. Thousands of spectators lined the approach roads. The bridge held. The animals crossed without incident. The combined weight of the procession, roughly 10,000 pounds, demonstrated to any skeptic willing to do the arithmetic that the bridge could handle any reasonable load that would ever be placed upon it.

The stunt worked. Public confidence recovered. The bridge went on to carry 9 million passengers in its first year of operation alone, and nearly 20 million in 1885 after the Brooklyn Union Elevated Railroad opened and connected to the bridge's own cable car service.

The Secret Wine Cellars Beneath the Bridge

Seven years before the bridge opened to traffic, while construction was still very much underway, the spaces beneath the approach ramps were already being put to use. The wine cellars are not a secret in the conspiratorial sense. They appear in city records, they were advertised in newspapers, and they were the subject of lavish parties. They are a secret only in the sense that almost nobody who crosses the bridge today knows they exist.

The story begins with a practical problem. The planned approach roads on both shores of the East River ran directly through the locations of two liquor businesses: Rackey's Wine Company on the Brooklyn side and Luyties and Co. on the Manhattan side. Washington Roebling saw an opportunity rather than an obstacle. Instead of simply demolishing these businesses and moving on, he incorporated storage chambers into the bridge's anchorage design, chambers that could be rented out to offset the enormous construction debt.

The vaults were built in 1876, seven years before the bridge opened. Their location beneath 60,000 tons of granite, sealed from daylight, and maintained at a consistently cool temperature around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, made them among the finest wine storage facilities in New York. Darkness and constant temperature are precisely what fine wines require.

The cellars closed during World War I and were repurposed for non-alcoholic storage during Prohibition. They briefly reopened after Prohibition ended in 1933. On July 11, 1934, the wine distributor Anthony Oechs and Co. moved into the Manhattan vaults and threw a party that The Pittsburgh Gazette described in extraordinary detail: musicians played Viennese waltzes, champagne corks popped, couples waltzed between crates stamped ANTHONY OECHS and CO., and overhead, Depression-era automobiles motored along at 20 miles per hour. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood in an alcove. The cave-like arches were hung with the gonfalons of the Medici.

The city reclaimed the cellars permanently after World War II. Today they are closed to the public for safety reasons and used to store maintenance equipment. The inscription scrawled on a crumbling interior wall sometime in the 1930s remains: Legend of Oechs Cellars: These cellars were built in 1876, about seven years prior to the official opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. From their inception, they housed the choicest wines in New York City.

The Cold War Bunker Nobody Knew About

In March 2006, city workers from the Department of Transportation were conducting a routine structural inspection on the Manhattan side of the bridge when they opened a door they had not noticed before. Behind it was a room stocked with survival supplies that had been sitting, untouched and forgotten, for roughly half a century.

The fallout shelter was located inside one of the massive stone arches beneath the bridge's Manhattan entrance, on the top floor of a three-story space within the anchorage itself. What the workers found inside was a snapshot of Cold War civil defense thinking:

The supply boxes were stamped with two dates: 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. These were the two moments in the Cold War when a nuclear attack on New York City felt closest to plausible. The shelter had been stocked, sealed, and then simply never mentioned again. The city had either forgotten about it or chosen not to disclose its location for security reasons. NYC Transport Commissioner Iris Weinshall said at the time that the discovery was eerie precisely because thousands of people crossed above it every day without knowing it was there.

The shelter is not open to the public, and the city has never revealed its precise location within the anchorage. It remains accessible only to maintenance workers. You can, however, stand at the corner of Pearl Street and Dover Street on the Manhattan side and look at the anchorage block above you knowing the room is somewhere inside it.

Your Complete Walking Guide for 2026

The Route

The pedestrian walkway is 1.1 miles long from end to end and elevated above the vehicle lanes, which means you walk with unobstructed sightlines in every direction. The walk takes between 25 and 45 minutes depending on your pace and how often you stop. There are benches at the towers if you need to rest.

The direction question matters more than most guides admit. Walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan puts the full Manhattan skyline ahead of you for the entire crossing. The Financial District, One World Trade Center, and the East River panorama open up progressively as you approach. The Statue of Liberty appears to the south. The Empire State Building punctuates the midtown horizon. This is the more rewarding visual experience and most locals recommend it.

Walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn is quieter in the early morning, puts you closer to DUMBO on arrival, and means a slightly steeper initial climb with a gradual descent into Brooklyn. Both directions are free, open 24 hours, and accessible by subway.

Entrances

When to Go

The bridge receives over 100,000 crossings per day and can feel genuinely congested on weekend afternoons in summer. The difference between a good experience and a great one comes down to timing.

Before 8 AM on any day is quiet enough that you can stop and stand still without being jostled. The light is soft and directional in the early morning, particularly in spring and autumn. Sunrise on the Brooklyn to Manhattan walk, with the skyline catching the first light, is one of the finer free experiences the city offers.

Late afternoon into evening is the second best window. The golden hour light falls on the stone towers and the river takes on a copper tone. After dark, the bridge is well lit, the skyline glitters, and the pedestrian numbers drop significantly. The city looks exactly like it does in every photograph you have ever seen of it, except you are standing in it.

What to Look for on the Bridge Itself

At each of the two towers, historical plaques detail the bridge's construction and engineering. Stop here and read them. Most visitors rush past. The view back toward Manhattan at the first tower and the view toward Brooklyn at the second tower are two of the most photographed perspectives in New York, and for good reason: the Gothic arches frame the skyline in a way that feels composed rather than accidental.

The vertical cables you walk beneath are not decoration. Each of the four main cables contains 278 wire strands. Each strand contains 278 individual wires. The total wire content runs to roughly 14,000 miles. The cables were the first large-scale use of steel wire for suspension bridge construction in history. Prior bridges used iron, which is heavier and less strong per unit weight. The switch to steel was one of John Roebling's key innovations and set the standard for every suspension bridge built afterward.

Look south from the pedestrian walkway and you will see the Statue of Liberty on a clear day. Look north and the Manhattan Bridge is immediately visible, its blue-painted steel a deliberate contrast to the Brooklyn Bridge's stone-and-cable aesthetic. The view of the Empire State Building framed between the Manhattan Bridge's towers, visible from Washington Street in DUMBO below, is the most photographed intersection of architecture in Brooklyn and worth finding once you descend.

After the Bridge: DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights

DUMBO is an acronym: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The neighborhood occupies the area beneath and around both bridges at the Brooklyn waterfront, and the name tells you everything about how it was perceived before artists and then tech companies moved in during the 1990s and 2000s. It is now one of the most photographed neighborhoods in Brooklyn and among the most expensive residential real estate in the borough.

The cobblestoned streets under the bridge, particularly the closed section of Washington Street, form the iconic photo spot where the Empire State Building appears perfectly framed between the Manhattan Bridge towers. It is heavily crowded on weekends but genuinely stunning on a clear weekday morning with good light.

Jane's Carousel, housed in a glass pavilion at the water's edge in Brooklyn Bridge Park, is one of those details that catches visitors off guard. The carousel was originally built in 1922 in Youngstown, Ohio, hand-restored over more than two decades by Jane Walentas in her DUMBO studio, and finally installed in its current pavilion in 2011. It operates year-round and costs only a few dollars per ride. The view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the carousel itself is exceptional.

Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a few minutes walk from the bridge's Brooklyn end, offers the full lower Manhattan skyline in an unobstructed arc. This is the view that film directors use when they want to show New York from a distance without the clutter of street level. On a clear day you see the Statue of Liberty, Governor's Island, the Financial District, and the bridge you just walked across. The promenade is narrow and therefore genuinely romantic in the old sense of the word, which is to say it is also frequently and ostentatiously romantic in the modern sense, with the predictable presence of proposals and anniversary photographs at most hours of the day.

Pebble Beach, the small pocket of waterfront at the base of Brooklyn Bridge Park, offers the best low-angle view of the bridge from below. It is tourist-heavy during the day but substantially quieter after dark, and the combination of the illuminated bridge, the river, and the glittering Manhattan skyline behind it constitutes about as good a photograph as this city offers without a helicopter.

The Brooklyn Flea operates in DUMBO on weekends from April through December, in the space beneath the Manhattan Bridge overpass. It is exactly what a flea market in this neighborhood should be: mostly locally sourced clothing, furniture, handmade jewelry, vintage goods, and art, with the occasional genuinely surprising find. It is worth an hour if you are there on a weekend and have not been before.

Frequently Asked Questions